Great Competitor Quotes

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved. Poetry by Suzy Kassem

If you want to succeed and leave your competitors behind, you need great plans and even greater strategies.

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved.

In order to become a success, a business doesn't just have to do well, it has to to better than its competitors. Being number one isn't just about bragging rights. Often it means the difference between prospering and merely hanging on.

Before you were born, and were still too tiny for the human eye to see, you won the race for life from among 250 million competitors. And yet, how fast you have forgotten your strength, when your very existence is proof of your greatness.

You feel ownership over your creation, your invention, and your ideas. But if you don’t legally claim them, you’re donating them to the public—or to competitors. Say you’ve come up with a solution to a problem. Protecting that potentially valuable IP creates a limited monopoly to keep people out. It’s like zone defense in basketball. IP rights help you own your zone—your competitive space where no one else can score. If the best offense is a great defense, then no offense is the worst.

The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.

Talent silences your competition; genius deafens them.

A business plan is like a war plan, when you competitors know about it, it's no longer of any use

Big Mountains are a completely different world. You can not conquer them, only rise to their height for a short time; & for that they demand a great deal. The struggle is not with the enemy, or a competitor like in sports, but with yourself, with the feelings of weakness & inadequacy. That struggle appeals to me. It is why I became a mountaineer.

Early entry is appropriate when the following general circumstances hold:   Image and reputation of the firm are important to the buyer, and the firm can develop an enhanced reputation by being a pioneer. Early entry can initiate the learning process in a business in which the learning curve is important, experience is difficult to imitate, and it will not be nullified by successive technological generations. Customer loyalty will be great, so that benefits will accrue to the firm that sells to the customer first. Absolute cost advantages can be gained by early commitment to supplies of raw materials, distribution channels, and so on.

The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors… . The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor… . How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

Another key strategic concept deriving from competitor analysis is creating a situation of mixed motives or conflicting goals for competitors. This strategy involves finding moves for which retaliation, though effective, would hurt the competitor’s broader position. For example, as IBM responds to the threat of the minicomputer with its own minicomputer, it may hasten the decline in growth of its large computers and accelerate the changeover to minicomputers. Placing competitors in a situation of conflicting goals can be a very effective strategic approach for attacking established firms that have been successful in their markets. Small firms and newly entered firms often have very little legacy in the existing strategies in the industry and can reap great rewards from finding strategies that penalize competitors for their stake in these existing strategies.

Markets mean patrons, buyers, consumers. There is under capitalism one way to wealth: to serve the consumers better and cheaper than other people do. But in the shop and factory, the owner—or in the corporations, the representative of the shareholders, the president—is the boss. The mastership is merely apparent and conditional. He is subject to the supremacy of the consumer. The consumer is king—the real boss—and the manufacturer is done for if he does not outstrip his competitors in best serving the consumers. It was this great economic transformation that changed the face of the world.

Skills have been de-emphasised in art, as elsewhere in the culture. The atomistic nature of our individuality is made clear in Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek ambition for us each to be ‘famous for fifteen minutes’. We’ve all got to be as creative as one another: to accept that some people will always be exceptional is uncomfortable for us. Instead of seeing great art as an indication of what humanity can achieve, it comes to be seen as an expression of what another being, a potential competitor, has achieved.

STAGE 1—shared by most street gangs and characterized by despair, hostility, and the collective belief that “life sucks.” STAGE 2—filled primarily with apathetic people who perceive themselves as victims and who are passively antagonistic, with the mind-set that “my life sucks.” Think The Office on TV or the Dilbert comic strip. STAGE 3—focused primarily on individual achievement and driven by the motto “I’m great (and you’re not).” According to the authors, people in organizations at this stage “have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors.’” STAGE 4—dedicated to tribal pride and the overriding conviction that “we’re great (and they’re not).” This kind of team requires a strong adversary, and the bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe. STAGE 5—a rare stage characterized by a sense of innocent wonder and the strong belief that “life is great.” (See Bulls, Chicago, 1995–98.)

How wonderful science is nowadays,” said Miss Marple. “Doctors can do so much, can’t they?” “We all have one great competitor,” said Dr. Graham. “Nature, you know. And some of the good old-fashioned home remedies come back from time to time.

Empirical evidence suggests that the relationship between the profitability of larger share and smaller share depends on the industry. Exhibit 7-1 compares the rate of return on equity of the largest firms accounting for at least 30 percent of industry sales (leaders) to the rate of return on equity of the medium-sized firms in the same industry (followers). In this calculation small firms with assets less than $500,000 were excluded. Although some of the industries in the sample are overly broad, it is striking that followers were noticeably more profitable than leaders in 15 of 38 industries. The industries in which the followers’ rates of return were higher appear generally to be those where economies of scale are either not great or absent (clothing, footwear, pottery, meat products, carpets) and/or those that are highly segmented (optical, medical and ophthalmic goods, liquor, periodicals, carpets, and toys and sporting goods). The industries in which leaders’ rates of return are higher seem to be generally those with heavy advertising (soap; perfumes; soft drinks; grain mill products, i.e., cereal; cutlery) and/or research outlays and production economies of scale (radio and television, drugs, photographic equipment). This outcome is as we would expect.

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, who’d once said, “When you see your competitor drowning, grab a fire hose and put it in his mouth.

Stage Five’s T-shirt would read “life is great,” and they haven’t been doing illicit substances. Their language revolves around infinite potential and how the group is going to make history—not to beat a competitor, but because doing so will make a global impact. This group’s mood is “innocent wonderment,” with people in competition with what’s possible, not with another tribe.

I’m always on the lookout for great companies in lousy industries. A great industry that’s growing fast, such as computers or medical technology, attracts too much attention and too many competitors.

You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

You might be thinking, “But what if someone steals my idea?” Trust me: most of us don’t have the spare time to start a company with your great idea, and even if we did, it’s going to be up to you to outexecute your competitors. You’re

Our industries, our trade, and our way of life generally have been based first on the exploitation of the earth's surface and then on the oppression of one another--on banditry pure and simple. The inevitable result is now upon us. The unsuccessful bandits are trying to despoil their more successful competitors. The world is divided into two hostile camps: at the root of this vast conflict lies the evil of spoliation which has destroyed the moral integrity of our generation. While this contest marches to its inevitable conclusion, it will not be amiss to draw attention to a forgotten factor which may perhaps help to restore peace and harmony to a tortured world. We must in our future planning pay great attention to food--the product of sun, soil, plant, and livestock--in other words, to farming and gardening.

Were an election for President to be held tomorrow, Old Abe would, without the special aid of any of his friends, walk over the course, without a competitor to dispute with him the great prize which his masterly ability, no less than his undoubted patriotism and unimpeachable honesty, have won.

At a nearby table, two men in suits were discussing the gymnastics final in booming voices. “She never would have won if the Russians hadn’t boycotted,” the man insisted. “It’s not a victory if the best players aren’t there.” Sam asked his mother whether she thought the man with the loud voice was right. “Hmm.” Anna sipped her iced tea and then she rested her chin in her hands, which Sam had learned to recognize as her philosophizing gesture. Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did. “Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

the course of time, all of Apple’s competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone.

During the Great Forgetting, it came to be understood among the people of our culture that life in “the wild” was governed by a single, cruel law known as the Law of the Jungle, or kill or be killed. In recent decades, by the process of looking (instead of merely assuming), ethologists have discovered this “kill or be killed” law is a fiction. In fact, a system of laws-universally observed- preserves the tranquility of the jungle, protects species and even individuals and promotes the well being of the community as a whole. The system has been called, the peacekeeping law, the law of limited competition, and animal ethics. Briefly, the law of limited competition is this: You may compete to the fullest extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors, or destroy their food source, or deny them access to food. In other words, you can compete but you may not wage war on your competitors.

According to Massimo Maffei from the University of Turin, plants-and that includes trees-are perfectly capable of distinguishing their own roots from the roots of other species and even from the roots of related individuals. But why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach teh forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer.

We usually think of suppliers as other firms, but labor must be recognized as a supplier as well, and one that exerts great power in many industries. There is substantial empirical evidence that scarce, highly skilled employees and/or tightly unionized labor can bargain away a significant fraction of potential profits in an industry.

For example, in intravenous (IV) solutions and kits for use in hospitals, procedures for attaching solutions to patients differ among competitive products and the hardware for hanging the IV bottles are not compatible. Here switching encounters great resistance from nurses responsible for administering the treatment and requires new investments in hardware.

Thus, by 1888 it had become evident that a national cooperative movement could not succeed in America, at least not in the absence of sustained, massive and violent attack on the wage-system, far more massive and well-organized than the Knights’ movement had been. As Henry Sharpe said, what they were doing was not realistic. Small workshops with little capital and obsolete machinery in an age of rapid industrialization; insufficient institution-building to give financial and material support to co-ops; enslavement to the market at a time when competitors would stop at nothing to suppress working-class moves toward independence. Especially with the weak leadership of Terence Powderly and the mass desertion of former Knights after 1886, as they lost strike after strike, the great dream of building a national cooperative economy was effectively over.

It is true that from time to time Jews suffered from the fury of an exploited peasantry or their competitors. But from time to time the aristocracy suffered the same fate. Thousands of French aristocrats were slaughtered during peasant uprisings or at the Great Terror of 1793. Many Russian aristocrats were killed or expelled during the October Revolution of 1917. Many of them were innocent, for class warfare can be as cruel as any war.

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself. Deforestation and the abuse of the soil, the depletion of precious metals, the migration of trade routes, the disturbance of economic life by political disorder, the corruption of democracy and the degeneration of dynasties, the decay of morals and patriotism, the decline or deterioration of the population, the replacement of citizen armies by mercenary troops, the human and physical wastage of fratricidal war, the guillotining of ability by murderous revolutions and counterrevolutions—all these had exhausted the resources of Hellas at the very time when the little state on the Tiber, ruled by a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, was training hardy legions of landowners, conquering its neighbors and competitors, capturing the food and minerals of the western Mediterranean, and advancing year by year upon the Greek settlements in Italy.

my pleasure in having Albertine living with me now was much less a positive pleasure than satisfaction at having removed from the world, where everyone could enjoy her in turn, the blossoming young girl who, even if she caused no great joy to me, at least could not offer it to anyone else. Ambition, glory could never have meant anything to me. Still less was I capable of experiencing hatred. All the same, carnal love for me was above all the joy of triumphing over so many competitors. I cannot repeat it too often, more than anything else it was relief from pain.

In the mid-1980s, Congress authorized the creation of the US Sentencing Commission to examine prison terms and codify norms to correct the arbitrary punishments meted out by unaccountable judges. First, in 1989 the commission’s guidelines for individuals went into effect, establishing a point system for how many years of prison a convicted criminal might get, based on the seriousness of the misconduct and a person’s criminal history. In 1991, amid public and congressional outrage that sentences for white-collar criminals were too light and fines and sanctions for corporations too lenient, the Sentencing Commission expanded the concept to cover organizations. It formalized the Sporkin-era regime of offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and reform. The new rules delineated factors that could earn a culprit mercy. In levying a fine, the court should consider, the sentencing guidelines said, “any collateral consequences of conviction.” 1 “Collateral consequences” was, and remains, an ill-defined concept. How worried should the government be if a punishment causes a company to go out of business? Should regulators worry about the cashiering of innocent employees? What about customers, suppliers, or competitors? Should they fret about financial crises? From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: “too big to jail.” Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.

I even reached a point of detachment where I was able to see clearly that he was a top operator of a complex vehicle who had some great skills and some fundamental problems. The trick to working well with him was to understand that the problems were his, not mine, and they all seemed to stem from his insecurity. He was unable to view his colleagues as anything other than competitors out to destroy him, who therefore needed to be squashed like bugs. Once, flying up to Washington in a NASA jet, I stopped to refuel and a military guy I’d never met before noticed the plane and said, “Hey, do you know ____? What an asshole!

Nietzsche's response to this situation is not to seek narcotics in a return to the past or a flight to the supersensible, but instead to assert, and in a deeper form to accept, even to accelerate, the approach of nihilism on a European, if not global, scale. A rejuvenation of the human spirit is possible only through a complete destruction of the decadent present. Like very few before him, Nietzsche sees the necessary link between radical creativity, on the one hand, and war, courage, and brutality, on the other. The great creators abominate everything that interferes with the full expression of their will to power; they are not egalitarians, democrats, or refined and tolerant appreciators of the poems of their competitors. The bestiality of the blonde beast may be understood not simply as an expression of the need to destroy in order to create but as a consequence of Nietzsche's fundamental identification of Being and history History is the dissolution of Being into chaos, as reorganized by the shifting perspectives of man, the highest incarnation of the will to power. As we have seen, a reliance upon courage led Nietzsche to invoke the unleashing of the blonde beasts and wars of universal destruction as the negative prelude to the advent of positive nihilism.

Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.

One article on reproductive strategies was titled "Sneaky Fuckers." Kya laughed. As is well known, the article began, in nature, usually the males with the most prominent secondary sexual characteristics, such as the biggest antlers, deepest voices, broadest chests, and superior knowledge secure the best territories because they have fended off weaker males. The females choose to mate with these imposing alphas and are thereby inseminated with the best DNA around, which is passed on to the female's offspring- one of the most powerful phenomena in the adaptation and continuance of life. Plus, the females get the best territory for their young. However, some stunted males, not strong, adorned, or smart enough to hold good territories, possess bags of tricks to fool the females. They parade their smaller forms around in pumped-up postures or shout frequently- even if in shrill voices. By relying on pretense and false signals, they manage to grab a copulation here or there. Pint-sized male bullfrogs, the author wrote, hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates. When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others. The imposter males were referred to as "sneaky fuckers." Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. "Unworthy boys make a lot of noise," Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone. Another article delved into the wild rivalries between sperm. Across most life-forms, males compete to inseminate females. Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other's flesh. Though very ritualized, the conflicts can still end in mutilations. To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods. Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own. Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

If buyers either are partially integrated or pose a credible threat of backward integration, they are in a position to demand bargaining concessions.9 The major automobile producers, General Motors and Ford, are well known for using the threat of self-manufacture as a bargaining lever. They engage in the practice of tapered integration, that is, producing some of their needs for a given component in-house and purchasing the rest from outside suppliers. Not only is their threat of further integration particularly credible, but also partial manufacture in-house gives them a detailed knowledge of costs which is a great aid in negotiation. Buyer power can be partially neutralized when firms in the industry offer a threat of forward integration into the buyers’ industry.

What if the interests of the self were expanded to the point of approximating a God’s eye view of humanity? Seeing all things under the aspect of eternity would make one objective toward oneself, accepting failure as on a par with success in the stupendous human drama of yes and no, positive and negative, push and pull. Personal failure would be as small a cause for concerns as playing a loser in a summer theater performance. How could one feel disappointed in one’s own defeat if one experienced the victor’s joy as also one’s own; if one’s competitor’s success was enjoyed vicariously? Instead of crying impossible, we should perhaps content ourselves with noting how different this would feel from life as it is usually lived, for reports of the greatest spiritual geniuses suggest they rose to something like this perspective

As it turned out, Sharpe was right. Cooperation succumbed to market forces, but even more to the war waged on it by the business classes. By 1887 the latter were determined to destroy the Knights, with their incessant boycotts, their strikes (sometimes involving hundreds of thousands), their revolutionary agitation, and their labor parties organized across the country. In the two years after the infamous Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the Great Upheaval of 1886, in which 200,000 trade unionists across the country went on a four-day-long strike for the eight-hour day but in most cases failed—partly because Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights, who had always disliked strikes, refused to endorse the action and encouraged the Knights not to participate—capitalist repression swept the nation. Joseph Rayback summarizes: The first of the Knights’ ventures to feel the full effect of the post-Haymarket reaction were their cooperative enterprises. In part the very nature of such enterprises worked against them. The successful ventures became joint-stock corporations, the wage-earning shareholders and managers hiring labor like any other industrial unit. In part the cooperatives were destroyed by inefficient managers, squabbles among shareholders, lack of capital, and injudicious borrowing of money at high rates of interest. Just as important was the attitude of competitors. Railroads delayed the building of tracks, refused to furnish cars, or refused to haul them. Manufacturers of machinery and producers of raw materials, pressed by private business, refused to sell their products to the cooperative workshops and paralyzed operations. By 1888 none of the Order’s cooperatives were in existence.170

What then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed at all which is greatest and scorned the accuracy which lies in every detail? They saw many other things and they also saw this, that Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal; but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her entirety, and most ardent competitors, did then implant in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is great and, by our own standard, more devine. Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within the scope of human endeavour not all the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which limit it; and if a man were to look upon life all around, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have been born.

Know the Competition I had a wonderful experience purchasing a luxury car. I was looking at three different brands. I have owned all three at different times in my life so I knew each fairly well. I had studied the market and knew most of the features of the competing models. However, this particular sales guy knew every detail about every car I was considering and so served me wonderfully in my purchase. He never once used his knowledge to speak poorly of the competition. On the contrary, he told me where each model was better than the car I was considering. Wow. I found myself starting to trust this guy because he was being honest and transparent. He stood firm that his car was the car I should buy because of its particular features and quality, but he brought great information about his competitors to the discussion. It was a really classy way to handle a sales role. A really sad part of my wonderful car purchase was that I was on a competitor’s lot the next day and the sales guy there knew less about the car he was selling than my guy knew about the same car. In

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number

has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that. Every now and then a wise colleague would pull Jobs aside to try to get him to settle down. Lee Clow was a master. “Steve, can I talk to you?” he would quietly say when Jobs had belittled someone publicly. He would go into Jobs’s office and explain how hard everyone was working. “When you humiliate them, it’s more debilitating than stimulating,” he said in one such session. Jobs would apologize and say he understood. But then he would lapse again. “It’s simply who I am,” he would say. One thing that did mellow was his attitude toward Bill Gates. Microsoft had kept its end of the bargain it made in 1997, when it agreed to continue developing great software for the Macintosh. Also, it was becoming less relevant as a competitor, having failed thus far to replicate Apple’s digital hub strategy. Gates and Jobs had very different approaches to products and innovation, but their rivalry had produced in each a surprising self-awareness.

If the global pie stayed the same size, there was no margin for credit. Credit is the difference between today’s pie and tomorrow’s pie. If the pie stays the same, why extend credit? It would be an unacceptable risk unless you believed that the baker or king asking for your money might be able to steal a slice from a competitor. So it was hard to get a loan in the premodern world, and when you got one it was usually small, short-term, and subject to high interest rates. Upstart entrepreneurs thus found it difficult to open new bakeries and great kings who wanted to build palaces or wage wars had no choice but to raise the necessary funds through high taxes and tariffs. That was fine for kings (as long as their subjects remained docile), but a scullery maid who had a great idea for a bakery and wanted to move up in the world generally could only dream of wealth while scrubbing down the royal kitchen’s floors. The Magic Circle of the Modern Economy It was lose-lose. Because credit was limited, people had trouble financing new businesses. Because there were few new businesses, the economy did not grow. Because it did not grow, people assumed it never would, and those who had capital were wary of extending credit. The expectation of stagnation fulfilled itself.

In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness. An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength... Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.

We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part. There is one aspect of the “timing” philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income. What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing—that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.

In the present time, Information Technology has emerged as one of the most promising Industries across the globe. Globally for the reduction of cost, time and efforts involved in the production and supply of the goods and services has made whole business world to adopt the technological support. And due to this reason only Software development have emerged as a important means of growth of IT Industry in India. Software Development Companies in India Have played a crucial role in rapid development of Software industry in India. These Companies Constantly improve and enhance the world of computers and technology. With the help of Software development all the complicated machines whether its computers, laptops, mobile phones or navigation devices all these machines are the way they are today performing various tasks successfully. As Software Development is having a essential role in many industries, so organizations have realized their importance for improving themselves in various aspects of management. Software Development have increased the productivity of the businesses by reducing the human efforts and errors. This increased demand in the Software Development have also given rise to high demand of Software Development Companies everywhere. Even there is a huge demand of best Software Company in Lucknow as Lucknow being capital of U.P have become a growing market for various industries and now almost every offline brand has setup into online businesses of their products and services. As the number of internet users are increasing day by day so are the businesses entering into the online so that they could influence customers online. Besides Software Development many other web solutions like web hosting, web development and website designing services have great demand in the market also therefore, Software Companies have started offering all these services along with software development. Software Industry is flooded with various software companies which are also Website Development Company in Lucknow offering various web based services but it is required by you to choose wisely which company to choose to help your business sustain successfully in long run and stay ahead of its competitors in the market. The company is choosen such that which provide good quality software’s in affordable price.

The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles. The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information. The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business. These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.

In late fall, I had a phone sessions with my Oregon therapist. For some reason, we started talking about happiness. “Chris achieved happiness so easily,” I said to him. “And I don’t.” The counselor interrupted me. “Do you know how he did?” I started to answer that I didn’t. But then I realized that Chris had set out to do many things, and he’d achieved them. He’d wanted to be a rodeo competitor, work as a cowboy, join the SEALs. He’d done all of those. What’s more, he excelled at them. Those achievements made him happy, or at least confident enough that he could be happy. As we talked, the counselor noted that I, too, had my own achievements. But I told him--as he already knew--that I wanted to do so many more things. And I always do. Was that a reason not to be happy? The counselor pointed out that I tend to focus on what I haven’t done, rather than what I’ve achieved. My thinking runs; If I do A, then B, then C, then I’ll be happy. But when I achieve A, rather than saying “Yay!” I say, “I haven’t done B and C, so I can’t be happy.” Why focus on what I haven’t done? Why not celebrate those things I have done, even as I look forward to doing other things on my list? Those achievements are accomplishments--I should feel good about them, confident I can do more. And happy. Or at least happier. Another lesson. There are other components to happiness beyond achievement. “Smaller” things, like carving out time for workouts as well as the kids, are actually big things when they are added up. Yet I often feel those things are distractions from what I really want to achieve. Blockers, rather than stepping-stones. Obviously, the wrong way to think about them. On paper, it doesn’t seem like a very profound realization. But put into practice, it means that I--we, all of us--have to keep things in the larger perspective. If you want to achieve a lot, then the reality is that you are always going to have something else you want to do. Keep trying to achieve, but don’t beat yourself up for not getting everything done. The “smaller” things are just as essential to happiness. So: the key to my happiness is appreciating what I have and what I’ve done, and realizing that I’ll always have something else to do. Profound? No, but empowering. I might never have realized it had I not been grieving so deeply. I would have felt silly, really, talking about achieving happiness when Chris was alive. Why wouldn’t I be happy with a great husband and wonderful children? I was happy. But not at the deepest level. I’m not there yet, obviously. But it is possible now. And yet I still wonder: How can I possibly be happy with Chris gone?

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

MT: Mimetic desire can only produce evil? RG: No, it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn't bad in itself, in fact it's very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep. It is to imitation that we owe not only our traditions, without which we would be helpless, but also, paradoxically, all the innovations about which so much is made today. Modern technology and science show this admirably. Study the history of the world economy and you'll see that since the nineteenth century all the countries that, at a given moment, seemed destined never to play anything but a subordinate role, for lack of “creativity,” because of their imitative or, as Montaigne would have said, their “apish” nature, always turned out later on to be more creative than their models. It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed them. It continued with the Americans in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget-makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese who, after World War II, were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority. It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. Mimetic rivalry cannot flare up without becoming destructive in a great many ways. We can see it today in the so-called soft sciences (which fully deserve the name). More and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things in the style of Jacques Lacan's Écrits. Just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers. In American universities the imitation of those models has since produced some pretty comical results. But today that lemon has been squeezed completely dry. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are. So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it. For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcise imitation. MT

Set aside time on a regular basis to immerse yourself in books, films, magazines, and other resources that stoke the fire of your curiosity. Keep a list of resources that strike you as interesting, and set aside time to experience them each day. I keep a “Stimulus Queue,” which is a list of all of the interesting books, films, or articles that I come across throughout my day and I want to revisit later, during my study time. I also use a variety of Web-based tools to stockpile articles I come across for later viewing. I then work through them systemically, take notes, and consider how they may apply to my work. Always leave time at the end of any reading/study session to reflect on what you’ve read and to consider how it is relevant to your work. The next great idea for your work will probably not come from watching your competitors, but from taking an insight from an unrelated industry and applying it to your own. Read and experience broadly, and with focus on your deeper questions.

Hannibal achieved this great victory not with superior numbers but superior strategy and extraordinary tactical execution. And that’s his lesson to us: When faced with superior competitors, use your knowledge of their habits and weaknesses to outsmart them. How can you invert commonplace thinking and outmaneuver your competitors when they’re falsely feeling confident?

Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved.

On defense, blitzscaling lets you set a pace that keeps your competitors gasping simply to keep up, affording them little time and space to counterattack. Because they’re focused on responding to your moves, which can often take them by surprise and force them to play catch-up, they don’t have as much time available to develop and execute differentiated strategies that might threaten your position. Blitzscaling helps you determine the playing field to your great advantage.

Time is the deadly enemy of the technology business. Today’s great idea is tomorrow’s obsolete concept. The longer it takes a company to get its product to the market, the greater the likelihood a competitor will be there first. Big plans with extended schedules are a risk in any business,

The peer pressure works because we believe that majority or the experts might know more than we do. Peer pressure works not because the majority or experts are always right but because we fear that we are maybe wrong. ... Have you ever had a sales wrap by selling you an office solution, by telling you that 70% of your competitors are using the service so why aren't you?" -"But what if 70% of your competitors are idiots?

Rather than asking customers explicitly about feature X, Y or Z, one approach to defining the MVP is to ask, “What is the smallest or least complicated problem that the customer will pay us to solve?” This approach runs counter to the typical cry for more features, which is often based on what the competitors have or what the last customer visited had to say. The MVP is the inverse of what most sales and marketing groups ask of their development teams.

I get excited by the kind of person I know you will become when you give up your excuses and start uncovering what you’ve been capable of all this time. I get excited by the kind of impact you will be able to have when you stop playing small, when you get out of your own way, when you are ready to be done holding back and to become all you were made to be. I get excited by inspiring every individual I meet to access his or her great potential so that the world doesn’t miss what he or she brings to the table. This is what finishing first is about for me. It’s not about proving yourself or beating your competitors but about accessing your deep purpose. What is your unique purpose? Do you know? If you do know, have you taken any time to stop and make sure you’re doing what you were put here to do? My faith tells me that everything is meaningful, that nothing happens by accident. You are here for a reason.

If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being the anti-______ is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers.

But why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer. Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance. When thick silver-gray beeches behave like this, they remind me of a herd of elephants. Like the herd, they, too, look after their own, and they help their sick and weak back up onto their feet. They are even reluctant to abandon their dead.

We don’t do superstars in our Tough Mudder world—but if we were to, it would be hard to ignore the claims of Amelia Boone, an athlete who now features regularly on the cover of Runner’s World and who has been the women’s champion at World’s Toughest three times. An in-house lawyer for Apple in Silicon Valley, Amelia is among the only competitors to keep running for twenty-four hours in the desert without a rest. She keeps coming back not for the glory of “winning” but because, she says, “you will never find a race like World’s Toughest Mudder—where you are technically running against other people but where you will still see the leader out there stopping to help people up over walls or out of the water. It is just this unwritten rule; no one questions it, that is how it is.” Amelia studied social anthropology before she became a lawyer, with an interest in the way that social norms and gossip were used by indigenous tribes to create and maintain healthy and coherent cultures. Tough Mudder, she suggests, is the closest she has come to seeing that tribal spirit in action in the contemporary world. “If I am out for a run and I see someone wearing a Tough Mudder headband or T-Shirt, there is always a big smile and a nod of recognition between us,” she says, as if she is speaking of a pair of Yanomami natives coming across each other on a forest trail. It’s a nod, she suggests, that communicates a great many things—not only shared philosophies and kinship but also the recognition that “I may well have pushed your wet ass over a wall at some point last year.

Do You Know How Search Engine Optimization Can Help You? In order to market your website and/or business effectively, you need to have the proper information to guide you along the way. Without the right info, you'll be swinging blindly in the most competitive marketplace in the world. Read the article below and find out about some tips you can use for optimizing your website. You will need to make your website pop up in the google search results. Build a really solid website and use search engine optimization to get it found. If other local businesses in your area don't have this, you will stand out like a shining star from the crowd. When it comes to linking your keywords, whether on your own site or on someone else's, quality beats quantity any day of the week. Make sure that your keywords are linked naturally in quality content. One proper, quality link will earn you much higher placement than 10 garbage links. Since web business is a marathon, it is good to plan around quality so that you last the long haul. To know where you stand with your particular niche market, you should check on your page rank at least once a week. By checking your rank, you will find out varying information about how competitors are finding you and you will also realize what you need to do in order to shoot up in the rankings. Your goal should be a page rank of 1. To search engine optimize your website, don't include more than 150 internal linking hyperlinks on your home page. Too many internal links on one page can dilute a web page's search engine rank. Huge numbers of links also make it hard for visitors to find the information that they need quickly. A great way to get more people to your site is to list your site with Google so that when people search through Google your page will come up. Listing your site in this way, will give you a vast venue where thousands of people will be introduced to your site and to your links. The future development strategy for all companies with a web site should include a strategy for search engine optimization, getting more traffic to their site. One key point is to be aware of the use of appropriate key words. Appropriate key words should be placed strategically throughout your site, the title tag and page header are generally the most important spots for keywords, be careful with your choices. Linking to lists is very popular for website owners and bloggers and can help your search engine optimization. You can find a lot of articles on the internet that are written as a top 10 list or top 100 list of tips or small facts. If possible, present well- written articles with relevant content composed as lists with numbers, not bullets, such as "10 ways to buy a new car." It's all about what the websites want in SEO, and that's what you need to realize. It doesn't matter if you're a simple blog or a legitimate business; you still need the proper optimization if you hope to achieve a high ranking. What you've read here will help you achieve that, but you still need to put the information to good use.

The most successful organizations don’t obsess about their competitors. They build great products or deliver great services that solve specific problems at a price their customers believe is fair.

If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being the anti-______ is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts positioned itself as the anti-Starbucks. Its ads once mocked Starbucks for using “Fritalian” terms instead of small, medium, and large. Another Dunkin’ campaign was centered on a taste test in which it beat Starbucks. There was even a site called DunkinBeatStarbucks.com where visitors could send e-cards with statements like “Friends don’t let friends drink Starbucks.

The 5C structure is generic—useful to product, marketing, and more—whereas the way we presented the sections in this chapter is very focused on product management. It’s good to know what the “C”s stand for because you’ll likely hear 5C mentioned. Plus if you need to do a situational analysis on your feet in a meeting or interview, it’s relatively easy to remember. Company: This refers to the company’s experience, technology, culture, goals, and more. It’s similar to the material we covered in the “Why Does the Company Exist?,” “How Do We Know If Our Product’s Good?,” and “What Else Has Been, Is Being, and Will Be Built?” sections. Customers: Who are the people buying this product? What are the market segments? How big are they? What are people’s goals with buying this product? How do they make buying decisions? Where do they buy this type or product? This is similar to what we covered in the “Customers and Personas” and “Use Cases” sections. Collaborators: Who are the external people who make the product possible, including distributors, suppliers, logistical operators, groundwork support personnel, and so on? Competitors: Who is competing for your customers’ money? This includes actual and potential competitors. You should look at how they position their product, the market size they address, their strengths and weaknesses, and more. Climate: These are the macro-environmental factors, like cultural, regulatory, or technological trends and innovations.

What are other people building? Who are the company’s main competitors? How are their target use cases, personas, and end customers different? How are their products different? How are they winning or losing compared to another company? Are you aware of who’s out there?

Growth Hacktic A clever way to determine specifically where your avatar spends time is to use a tool called SimilarWeb. Enter your competitor’s URLs into the tool, and scroll down to see exactly where their website traffic is coming from. This is a great way to discover places to “steal” clients away from your competition.

circa 1985. Vida's great claim to fame was winning a televised wet T-shirt contest in Destin she'd beaten 150 other competitors-but two children and ten thousand cheeseburgers had deflated her prized assets and hidden her waist in a roll of hard fat.

Policies and control processes became so foundational to our work that those who were great at coloring within the lines were promoted, while many creative mavericks felt stifled and went to work elsewhere. I was sorry to see them go, but I believed that this was what happens when a company grows up. Then two things occurred. The first is that we failed to innovate quickly. We had become increasingly efficient and decreasingly creative. In order to grow we had to purchase other companies that did have innovative products. That led to more business complexity, which in turn led to more rules and process. The second is that the market shifted from C++ to Java. To survive, we needed to change. But we had selected and conditioned our employees to follow process, not to think freshly or shift fast. We were unable to adapt and, in 1997, ended up selling the company to our largest competitor.

None of us can do as well solo as we do in a race when we compete with others. Your competitor is helping you to discover your limits and potential and how you have more in yourself than you thought possible. She is your greatest ally in that self-discovery, and you are the same for her,

The AR-57, also known as the AR Five Seven, is available as either an upper receiver for the AR-15/M16 rifle or a complete rifle, firing 5.7×28mm rounds from standard FN P90 magazines. It was designed by AR57 LLC and[3] was produced by AR57 of Kent, Washington, United States. The AR-57 PDW upper is a new design on AR-15/M16 rifles, blending the AR-15/M16 lower with a lightweight, monolithic upper receiver system chambered in FN 5.7×28mm. This model is also sold as a complete rifle, supplied with two 50-round P90 magazines.[1] The magazines mount horizontally on top of the front handguard, with brass ejecting through the magazine well. Hollow AR-15 magazines can be used to catch spent casings. Unlike the standard AR-15 configuration which uses a gas-tube system , the AR-57 cycles via straight blowback.[6] A fully automatic version exists and was marketed as a competitor to the P90 and other personal defense weapons.[7] Manufactured by the eponymous AR57 LLC, and chambered in 5.7x28mm, this upper is less powerful than the standard 5.56mm version, but it has certain tangible advantages, including reduced muzzle blast, a high practical rate of fire, nonexistent recoil, and the ability to use folding stocks. Since the buffer is located within the receiver, folding stocks may also be used for compact storage or carry. To load, place the base plate of a standard FN P90 magazine into the recess on the front of the upper, then press the feed lip side down on the catch located above and slightly back of the bolt. To charge, pull on the right-side nonreciprocating handle and release. The right-side charging hand placement makes it accessible for operation by the strong hand. Since it only has to be operated once every 50 shots, the time penalty for moving the hand off the pistol grip isn’t too great. Empties will eject downward through the nominal magazine well. Some people use a 20-round magazine body with the feed lips, spring and follower removed to act as a brass catcher. The magazine has no provision for activating the bolt lock when empty, but the bolt can be locked open using the catch on the lower. The upper runs very cleanly and reliably, requiring no maintenance after the first 500 shots. The AR57 comes with a medium fluted barrel, reasonable for a varmint rifle but excessive for a defensive carbine. Burning around six grains per shot, 5.7x28mm runs much cooler than 5.56mm, which burns four or more times as much. That yields much reduced muzzle blast and far greater heat endurance, of course at the cost of a roughly 40 percent slower bullet.

Joan Joyce is the real deal, a fierce competitor and one of the greatest athletes and coaches in sports history. Tony Renzoni’s moving tribute to Joan shows us why she is a champion in sports and in life. —Billie Jean King, sports icon and equality pioneer The story is all true. Joan Joyce was a tremendous pitcher, as talented as anyone who ever played. [responding to a newspaper account of his early 1960s match-ups against Joan Joyce] —Ted Williams, Hall of Famer and Boston Red Sox great, December 30, 1999 Joan Joyce is truly the greatest female athlete in sports history. And a great coach as well. Tony Renzoni’s well-researched book is a touching tribute to this phenomenal athlete. I highly recommend this book! —Bobby Valentine, former MLB player and manager Quotes for Historic Connecticut Music Venues: From the Coliseum to the Shaboo: I would like to thank Tony Renzoni for giving me the opportunity to write the foreword to his wonderful book. I highly recommend Connecticut Music Venues: From the Coliseum to Shaboo to music lovers everywhere! —Felix Cavaliere, Legendary Hall of Famer (Young Rascals/Rascals, Solo) As the promoter of the concerts in many of the music venues in this book, I hope you enjoy living the special memories this book will give you. —Jim Koplik, Live Nation president, Connecticut and Upstate New York Tony Renzoni has captured the soul and spirit of decades of the Connecticut live music scene, from the wild and wooly perspective of the music venues that housed it. A great read! —Christine Ohlman, the “Beehive Queen,” recording artist/songwriter Tony Renzoni has written a very thoughtful and well-researched tribute to the artists of Connecticut, and we are proud to have Gene included among them. —Lynne Pitney, wife of Gene Pitney Our Alice Cooper band recorded the Billion Dollars Babies album in a mansion in Greenwich. Over the years, there have been many great musicians from Connecticut, and the local scene is rich with good music. Tony Renzoni’s book captures all of that and more. Sit back and enjoy the ride. —Dennis Dunaway, hall of famer and co-founder of the Alice Cooper band. Rock ’n’ Roll music fans from coast to coast will connect to events in this book. Strongly recommended! —Judith Fisher Freed, estate of Alan Freed

In fact, there were two key differences between great competitors and good ones: Skill. The best swimmers swim differently than the ones who don’t perform as well. They do their strokes differently; they do their turns differently. These are learned and practiced skills. Attitude. The best swimmers bring a different attitude to their training. They choose to find delight in the parts that other swimmers avoid.

It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners—a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the minds of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure—and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue. Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice—and you are the last of their victims.

reciprocal interdependence is most demanding. That’s when people, teams, silos, and such must constantly adjust back and forth in response to one another as the work unfolds. Football (aka soccer) is a great example. Players constantly change what they do in response to passes and shots from teammates and competitors—who, in turn, constantly adjust to others’ passes and shots.

The success of product development and launch strategies for businesses in all industries is greatly influenced by best market research companies in Myanmar. These businesses enable businesses to make informed decisions that drive innovation and market penetration by providing valuable insights into consumer behaviors, market trends, and competitive landscapes. In today's dynamic business environment, it is essential for organizations looking to create competitive products and launch them successfully to comprehend the significance of market research. This article looks at how market research companies play a variety of roles in product development and launch strategies. It emphasizes the importance of working together, making decisions based on data, and taking advantage of market research trends for long-term growth and market leadership. 1. Companies' Introduction to Market Research An Overview of Business Market Research Market research is essential for helping businesses comprehend their market, competition, and customers. To make decisions based on accurate information, it involves gathering and evaluating data. Contribution of best market research companies in Myanmar to Product Development Market research firms are specialized in collecting insights that can be used to inform product development strategies for businesses. They assist in determining the demand for new products, assessing consumer behavior, and identifying market opportunities. 2. Understanding Consumer Needs and Preferences is Critical to Product Development Market research provides businesses with in-depth insights into consumer preferences, needs, and actions. In order to create products that resonate with the intended audience, this understanding is essential. Research can be used to assess market demand and potential, allowing businesses to make decisions about product development based on data. New products' chances of success are boosted while risks are reduced. 3. Utilizing Market Research for Launch Strategies Market Segmentation and Targeting Market research enables businesses to divide their target market into subsets based on behavior, psychographics, and demographics. For a more successful product launch, this segmentation helps tailor marketing strategies to specific consumer groups. Pricing and Positioning Strategies Businesses can figure out the best pricing strategy for their products based on consumer perceptions, competitor pricing, and market trends by conducting market research. Additionally, research aids in effectively positioning products in the market to set them apart from rivals. 4. Collaborating with Market Research Firms Choosing the Right Market Research Partner It is essential to select the right market research partner in order to obtain insights that are both accurate and applicable. Expertise, industry experience, and the capacity to provide insights that are in line with the company's goals should all be taken into account. Creating Effective Research Briefs Businesses should provide their market research partner with concise and in-depth research briefs to maximize the value of the research. A clearly defined brief assists in ensuring that the research is focused, pertinent, and in line with the company's objectives. 5. Studies of Cases: Product Launches That Work: The Importance of Market Research Market research is essential to the success of product launches. We are able to see the direct impact of market research on product development strategies by analyzing real-world examples. Market research companies offer valuable insights that can make or break a product launch, from comprehending consumer preferences to determining market gaps. ### Impact of Market Research on Product Launches Market research has a significant impact on product launches because it ensures that businesses know what their target audience wants and needs. Companies are able to effectively f

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS: A POLEMIC The three essays which constitute this genealogy are, as regards expression, aspiration, and the art[Pg 117] of the unexpected, perhaps the most curious things that have ever been written. Dionysus, as you know, is also the god of darkness. In each case the beginning is calculated to mystify; it is cool, scientific, even ironical, intentionally thrust to the fore, intentionally reticent. Gradually less calmness prevails; here and there a flash of lightning defines the horizon; exceedingly unpleasant truths break upon your ears from out remote distances with a dull, rumbling sound,—until very soon a fierce tempo is attained in which everything presses forward at a terrible degree of tension. At the end, in each case, amid fearful thunderclaps, a new truth shines out between thick clouds. The truth of the first essays the psychology of Christianity: the birth of Christianity out of the spirit of resentment, not, as is supposed, out of the "Spirit,"—in all its essentials, a counter-movement, the great insurrection against the dominion of noble values. The second essay contains the psychology of conscience: this is not, as you may believe, "the voice of God in man"; it is the instinct of cruelty, which turns inwards once it is unable to discharge itself outwardly. Cruelty is here exposed, for the first time, as one of the oldest and most indispensable elements in the foundation of culture. The third essay replies to the question as to the origin of the formidable power of the ascetic ideal, of the priest ideal, despite the fact that this ideal is essentially detrimental, that it is a will to nonentity and to decadence. Reply: it flourished not because God was active behind the priests, as is generally believed, but because it was[Pg 118] a faute de mieux—from the fact that hitherto it has been the only ideal and has had no competitors. "For man prefers to aspire to nonentity than not to aspire at all." But above all, until the time of Zarathustra there was no such thing as a counter-ideal. You have understood my meaning. Three decisive overtures on the part of a psychologist to a Transvaluation of all Values.—This book contains the first psychology of the priest.

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS: A POLEMIC The three essays which constitute this genealogy are, as regards expression, aspiration, and the art of the unexpected, perhaps the most curious things that have ever been written. Dionysus, as you know, is also the god of darkness. In each case the beginning is calculated to mystify; it is cool, scientific, even ironical, intentionally thrust to the fore, intentionally reticent. Gradually less calmness prevails; here and there a flash of lightning defines the horizon; exceedingly unpleasant truths break upon your ears from out remote distances with a dull, rumbling sound,—until very soon a fierce tempo is attained in which everything presses forward at a terrible degree of tension. At the end, in each case, amid fearful thunderclaps, a new truth shines out between thick clouds. The truth of the first essays the psychology of Christianity: the birth of Christianity out of the spirit of resentment, not, as is supposed, out of the "Spirit,"—in all its essentials, a counter-movement, the great insurrection against the dominion of noble values. The second essay contains the psychology of conscience: this is not, as you may believe, "the voice of God in man"; it is the instinct of cruelty, which turns inwards once it is unable to discharge itself outwardly. Cruelty is here exposed, for the first time, as one of the oldest and most indispensable elements in the foundation of culture. The third essay replies to the question as to the origin of the formidable power of the ascetic ideal, of the priest ideal, despite the fact that this ideal is essentially detrimental, that it is a will to nonentity and to decadence. Reply: it flourished not because God was active behind the priests, as is generally believed, but because it was[Pg 118] a faute de mieux—from the fact that hitherto it has been the only ideal and has had no competitors. "For man prefers to aspire to nonentity than not to aspire at all." But above all, until the time of Zarathustra there was no such thing as a counter-ideal. You have understood my meaning. Three decisive overtures on the part of a psychologist to a Transvaluation of all Values.—This book contains the first psychology of the priest.

The value of good design is the increased possibility of success. We understand its importance in everyday objects like chairs, clothes, watches, coffee makers, and a good mattress. When it comes to websites, we tend to think of design as a surface layer applied at the end. In truth, that website’s design started long ago. It can be intentional or happenstance. For design to be truly great, you need to build it into your projects from conception. Because if you’re not doing it, you can bet your competitors are.

And if you have an area you’re working, talk to customers. Every day. Talk to users of your product, active, inactive, new, and old. Talk to people who don’t want to use your product. Talk to people who are using a competitor’s product. Talk to customers of products in adjacent markets. Now, reread this paragraph and replace talk with listen. Understand how customers see the world. They don’t know the solutions, but they know the problems well. If you haven’t talked to a customer today, you’re doing it wrong. The simple fact is that the majority of great software startups today … required no technical insight to start, and you can always hire experts to help you scale. The driver of these innovations is an uncommon understanding of what the customer (aka humans) wants or how to deliver an understood solution in a better way. —S

There’s the potential that Tesla is setting itself up to capitalize on a situation like the one Apple found itself in when it first introduced the iPhone. Apple’s rivals spent the initial year after the iPhone’s release dismissing the product. Once it became clear Apple had a hit, the competitors had to catch up. Even with the device right in their hands, it took companies like HTC and Samsung years to produce anything comparable. Other once-great companies like Nokia and BlackBerry didn’t withstand the shock. If, and it’s a big if, Tesla’s Model 3 turned into a massive hit—the thing that everyone with enough money wanted because buying something else would just be paying for the past—then the rival automakers would be in a terrible bind. Most of the car companies dabbling in electric vehicles continue to buy bulky, off-the-shelf batteries rather than developing their own technology. No matter how much they wanted to respond to the Model 3, the automakers would need years to come up with a real challenger and even then they might not have a ready supply of batteries for their vehicles. “I think it is going to be a bit like that,” Musk said. “When will the first non-Tesla Gigafactory get built? Probably no sooner than six years from now. The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward. They’re probably more like seven years away. But I hope I’m wrong.” Musk

The Purpose gives the array of these actions coherence, not just at any given moment, but over time, and thus helps ensure that the firm does achieve a genuine specialization, a genuine difference from its competitors. In this way it makes superior profits possible. Purpose

What kind of experience do you want to deliver to your customers? Starbucks wanted to bring the Italian coffee-drinking ritual to customers in the USA and around the world. How do you want to stand out by offering a better experience to your customers? What’s the experience they want to have in every interaction with your brand? Can you craft an experience around how your customers want to feel? Do they want to be delighted, nurtured, listened to, pampered, or something else? How are you going to get them there? How does your customer experience differentiate you from your competitors? Instagram’s simplicity and the fact that social sharing was built into the user interface offered users a different level of engagement with the app than that provided by other photo-sharing apps. How does experiencing your brand, from the first point of contact to the last, make your customers feel? How could you make that experience something that your customers can’t wait to share? Dollar Shave Club customers feel savvy and they want to share the discovery of the secret with their friends.

Sources Of Customers, Best To Worst 1st Your existing customers 2nd Referrals from your happy customers 3rd Your company’s existing customers 4th Your competitor’s existing customers. Follow the salesman. (You’re going to love this!) 5th That great customer with an immediate need. Direct mail...cold calling 6th People who buy from your method of selling… in-home, mail, referral. 7th Pretty much the other 94% of the world.

The next great idea for your work will probably not come from watching your competitors, but from taking an insight from an unrelated industry and applying it to your own.

What’s in it for me?” Our culture teaches us that if we want something in life, we have to “look out for number one.” It says, “Life is a game, a race, a competition, and you better win it.” Schoolmates, work colleagues, even family members are seen as competitors—the more they win, the less there is for you. Of course we try to appear generous and cheer for others’ successes, but inwardly, privately, so many of us are eating our hearts out when others achieve. Many of the great things in the history of our civilization have been achieved by the independent will of a determined soul.

The desire to compete and win is part of what motivates great athletes to play their best. But the negative thought (fear) of losing also drives them to pursue victory. The same is true concerning the bema. Paul saw himself as a competitor, determined to win. How awesome then must our God be that when we see Him, we will either desperately wish or jubilantly celebrate that our life had been devoted to Him?

So, execution is really the critical part of a successful strategy. Getting it done, getting it done right, getting it done better than the next person is far more important than dreaming up new visions of the future. All of the great companies in the world out-execute their competitors day in and day out in the marketplace, in their manufacturing plants, in their logistics, in their inventory turns—in just about everything they do. Rarely do great companies have a proprietary position that insulates them from the constant hand-to-hand combat of competition.

Take the value “We treat customers the way we would want to be treated.” That’s pretty tangible, but Bank One had literally identified the ten or twelve behaviors that made that value come to life. Here are some of them: Never let profit center conflicts get in the way of doing what is right for the customer. Give customers a good, fair deal. Great customer relationships take time. Do not try to maximize short-term profits at the expense of building those enduring relationships. Always look for ways to make it easier to do business with us. Communicate daily with your customers. If they are talking to you, they can’t be talking to a competitor. Don’t forget to say thank you. Another value Bank One had was: “We strive to be the low-cost provider through efficient and great operations.” Some of the prescribed behaviors included: Leaner is better. Eliminate bureaucracy. Cut waste relentlessly. Operations should be fast and simple. Value each other’s time. Invest in infrastructure. We should know our business best. We don’t need consultants to tell us what to do.

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth. These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct: 1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 4. Sales matters just as much as product.

Another thing you need to understand is what we now call the “core competencies” of your organization. What are we really good at? What do our customers pay us for? Why do they buy from us? In a competitive, nonmonopolistic market—and that is what the world has become—there is absolutely no reason why a customer should buy from you rather from your competitor. None. He pays you because you give him something that is of value to him. What is it that we get paid for? You may think this is a simple question. It is not. I have been working with some of the world’s biggest manufacturers, producers, and distributors of packaged consumer goods. All of you use their products, even in Slovenia. They have two kinds of customers. One, of course, is the retailer. The other is the housewife. What do they pay for? I have been asking this question for a year now. I do not know how many companies in the world make soap, but there are a great many. And I can’t tell the difference between one kind of soap or the other. And why does the buyer have a preference—and a strong one, by the way? What does it do for her? Why is she willing to buy from one manufacturer when on the same shelves in the United States or in Japan or in Germany they are soaps from other companies? She usually does not even look at them. She reaches out for that one soap. Why? What does she see? What does she want? Try to work on this. Incidentally, the best way to find out is to ask customers not by questionnaire but by sitting down with them and finding out. The most successful retailer I know in the world is not one of the big retail chains. It is somebody in Ireland, a small country about the size of Slovenia. This particular company is next door to Great Britain with its very powerful supermarkets, and all of them are also in Ireland. And yet this little company has maybe 60 percent of the sandwich market. What do they do? Well, the answer is that the boss spends two days each week in one of his stores serving customers, from the meat counter to the checkout counter, and is the one who puts stuff into bags and carries it out to the shoppers’ automobiles. He knows what the customers pay for. But let me go back to the beginning: The place to start managing is not in the plant, and it is not in the office. You start with managing yourself by finding out your own strengths, by placing yourself where your strengths can produce results and making sure that you set the right example (which is basically what ethics is all about), and by placing your people where their strengths can produce results.

with clever strategic planning, you can eliminate your competitor’s advantage.